


Sorry

by olivemartini



Series: The Malec Chronicles [23]
Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 17:48:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11811111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: He used to be good at apologizing (all the time, for everything, even things that weren't his fault) but now when it matters, when he's watching Magnus walk away for good and it's the only thing that might make him stay, Alec can't bring himself to say anything.





	Sorry

If there was one thing that Alec thought he was good at, it was saying sorry.

Sometimes, growing up, it had felt like the only thing he could do:  _sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry for being the way I am and who I am and nothing more, sorry for this thing that's not really my fault, sorry for some pain that you have that I didn't cause but can't make better, sorry sorry sorry,_ hunching in his shoulders and fading into the background to take up less space, stuttering out sentences that let him take all the blame and responsibility onto his shoulders even when it should belong to someone else.

He had grown out of it, with a little help, learning that there's nothing wrong with the way he is and that sometimes he should swallow his sorries and let someone else take the blame, but now he wishes he had that impulse back so he could say the one thing that really matters, the one thing that he thinks might stop Magnus from looking at him like he is, stop the image of him walking away and never coming back:  _sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm still new to the idea of being loved like I want to be loved, loved like I never thought I deserved to be, and I just wanted to know how to keep it for as long as I could, sorry sorry sorry, sorry I was afraid, sorry I did this horrible thing, sorry I couldn't trust you, sorry I wanted more even though you were already giving me all that you were willing to._

But he doesn't say that, just watches Magnus walk away by the light of the witch light, trying not to feel like everything in his life was collapsing around him.

 

 

 

He goes to the loft like Magnus had asked him to, packing up the parts of him that had managed to get strewn all over the place ( _the physical thingsw, like shirts and his favorite mug and stray pairs of socks, but nothing is going to be able to get back the memories and emotions that had spilled here, the firsts and the lasts and the never agains that had happened in this very apartment_ ).  It's incredibly painful to be in here without Magnus with him, even more so when he thinks about how he won't be coming back, how he won't stand on that balcony in the morning with a steaming mug of coffee or stumble in late at night to find Magnus hunched over the table working while he waits for Alec, how there will be no home made dinners or movie nights.

Alec doesn't want to go into the bedroom, because he thinks then the pain of what he lost will hit him in the chest and knock him down, but he finally steels his nerves and pushes the door open, crossing the threshold and taking a deep breath, the empty box in his hands.  He rummages through drawers to gather up the sweaters and jeans and sweat pants, leaving the shirt that Magnus likes to sleep in when Alec is out on a mission and can't come home.  He cleans out the bathroom, throwing the comb and toothbrush and keeping the half used stick of deodorant, and then goes out to sit on the bed, wondering how it's possible that this is all that he left here.

He finds himself staring at the picture on the bedside table, the one of the two of them from their trip around the world, back when Alec hadn't cared about the ones who came before or how he doesn't know anything about them, back when he was young and in love and hadn't known what it felt like when real life came in between that.  They have their arms around each other and are smiling, an unstaged smile because they are laughing at the slightly drunk girl taking their picture and proclaiming for the whole street to hear how cute they are, how in love they are, how they'll be together forever, the twilight sky wrapping around them in the back ground.  

Alec wants to take it, but leaves it because it actually was Magnus', taken with his camera and printed at home with his magic and put in a frame he bought, so he forces himself out into the living room to grab the mug that he brought from home and lay his key on the kitchen table, a final goodbye.  But then right before he leaves he turns back, heads back into that room and slips the photo out, because he knows that if he leaves it, it might stay there for a while, but then Magnus would send it to wherever he puts the reminders of lost loves and would never to be seen again.

 _At least this way someone will see it,_ Alec thinks bitterly, tucking it into the back pocket of his jeans because he can't bear to put it into the box with all the other sad and discarded things.   _At least this way one of us will be willing to admit that it happened._

 

 

 

 

He's keeping himself distracted.

Alec trains with Jace, and gets dragged along on outings with Izzy, and at night when he doesn't want to be alone with the sound of his own breathing he goes out and kills demons, taking more risks than normal and end up with demon ichor splattered and burning on his skin and cuts that will take a long time to heal, then heading to Clary's house for an iratze so his family won't know about it.

He likes this better, losing himself in the feel of splitting skin and breaking bone and the feeling of doing something.  Alec had been told before that killing things, of doing his duty as a shadowhunter, does wonders to let an open wound heal, but he finds that that isn't exactly true- it just sort of buries it in a thick scab that you don't notice until you're alone, and when you are alone, you can't help but pick and pick and pick until all the bad things come flooding back, like now, when he's in his room and staring at that picture that he stole, wrapped in the shirt that's too small on him but he couldn't bear to give back, wishing that he had never done the things he had to make himself feel like this.

"It's going to get better,"  Izzy tells him, after she caught him staring at his phone, after the third time she had gone to try and talk some sense into Magnus, her jaw set and eyes soft in the way they had been when he first told her (choking out through the ragged breath that rarely happens, the one that means he's so upset that he's just trying to hold off the tears) that he and Magnus aren't going to be forever, anymore, and they never would have been, anyways, because Alec would have died and Magnus would have lived and it wouldn't have mattered in the grand scheme of the world.  "You just have to give it time."

"How much time?"  He says, looking down at his hands, which are burning and covered in bandages because he got it into his head to just decapitate a demon with a dagger and then keep going, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.  "I want it to be better now."

"I know,"  She says, smoothing his hair down to make it lie flat, a gesture so motherly and caring it almost makes him want to cry, and she tucks him into her side so he feels like the younger sibling, and it's the first time he thinks that maybe he didn't need to carry all this weight on his own, after all.  "I know you do."

 

 

 

He thinks of how Magnus is doing sometimes, to the point of where he even asks Jace about it and has Jace stare at him with this  _look,_ the kind that says without words how stupid he thinks Alec is being.  But he can't keep himself from thinking about, of Magnus alone in that apartment, eating food that he doesn't like because he doesn't see the point of cooking for one, staying up all night and all day because no one is there to tell him to sleep, alone, just sitting and staring at the wall.

And he thinks about that picture frame, the one that used to hold the photo that Alec keeps in his bedside drawer and looks at before he falls asleep, wondering if Magnus had taken the frame and threw it away, or if it has a new picture, or if maybe Magnus just kept it where it was and in the morning he wakes up to see it blank and empty, an awful of reminder of what he used to have.

 

 

"I wish I could go back to thinking I was in love with you,"  Alec says, after he and Jace had sparred for three hours straight and Jace ( _who could have gone another five hours because he's a literal superhero, but called it quits because Alec might have died_ ) had flopped down onto the floor, picking up his phone to return Clary's texts.  "It didn't hurt as much."

Jace stars at him, golden eyes glowing in the light of the sun.  "I could beat him up for you,"  He offers, exited at the prospect, because that is what Jace does, he kills things that hurt the people he cares about.  "Not too bad.  Just enough that he feels the Herondale wrath."

Alec stares at him, unimpressed, and knows that Jace knows what this feeling is, because he had watched him when he loved Clary but thought he could never have her, and then again when he did have her but pushed her away to protect himself, and then now when everything seems fine but can't touch her because he has literal fire inside him.  Which is still weird, and they still haven't fixed, and tends to  cause him to need new shoes on alternate Thursdays.  "I just didn't expect it to feel like this,"  Alec admits, blinking away the sudden burning in his eyes.  "Is it always going to feel like this?"

Jace doesn't say anything, just stretches out beside him and puts his head on his shoulder, but somehow, that's answer enough.

 

 

 

"I hope you're okay,"  Alec says, words slurring, because he is drunk, because that is the only way besides the killing and the ichpor burns that he can get through this.  "Jace told me not to call, but.. Jace isn't here.  And he's an asshole.  So I called."

There's a pause, and breathing on the other end of the line.  "I just wanted to say sorry.  Sorry, cause I love you, so much, and I didn't want it to be like this, because you made me feel like I wasn't stupid and awful and wrong and I stopped with the constant apologizing, but I need to say sorry now because I hurt you, and I never wanted to hurt you."

He's not going to remember this in the morning.  He hasn't remembered any of the other late night calls, either.  "I just wanted to say that I love you, okay?  I'm going to love you forever.  So if you decide that you're able to love me again, somehow, I'd be very okay that."

A pause again, where he stares at the picture and listens to what is definitely Magnus breathing on the other end, because now it's gotten all shaky and trembly, the way he does when he takes deep breaths to stop himself from crying.  "Call me sometime, okay?  I just..." 

He doesn't finish, never does, just lets his phone fall to the floor instead and hopes that Jace does follow through on his threat of breaking it.


End file.
